


A Voice in the Dark

by Horolojium



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Nyota Uhura, Gen, Mild Angst, Uhura centric, music in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24297628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Horolojium/pseuds/Horolojium
Summary: Trapped in a drifting shuttlecraft with injured crew, dwindling rations, and no hope of rescue, Lieutenant Commander Nyota Uhura learns that she too can make miracles.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	A Voice in the Dark

People think they know the worst way to die in space. They imagine the horror of a rip in an EVA suit, the frantic few seconds of fear, and the blissful spread of black behind their eyes before the empty depths takes what it wants from their body. 

They imagine this, in loving detail. I am prepared for this, they think smugly. I know what hell looks like, and I am not afraid. 

But they are wrong. The worst way to die in space is not the cold, merciful squeeze of the vacuum. The worst that space can offer is to break your shuttlecraft just enough, and then let you drift to a death you can do nothing but wait for. 

The runabout Volga, of the starship Enterprise, has been lost in space for forty five days. There are four crew members, two protein bars, and twelve hours of oxygen left. 

Nyota did not think this was how she was going to die. When she was old enough to think of such things, Nyota wanted her death to be like her Bibi’s- The smile and sigh of an old woman who knows she has lived her life well, and leaves it surrounded by family and bathed in the light of the dawn. 

When she joined Starfleet, this vision changed. Nyota didn’t crave the kind of pyre Kirk did back then, she had no desire to snuff out her life chasing an adrenaline high. But she accepted the possibility of a high octane death, and moved on. But four years into the five year mission, Nyota stopped thinking about her death at all. 

Not because she grew to trust that her captain put the lives of his crew over everything else, although that happened as well. Not because she doesn’t still hope for the dignity of a peaceful passing in old age, because that hope lives in Nyota’s heart. Nyota stops thinking about her death, because four years into an exploratory mission has taught her there is no good way to die. To imagine that she has a choice in the matter is naive. 

But if Nyota did think about her death, she did not think it would be like this. An ion current ripped the shuttle out of its flight path down to a peace conference on the planet Cefinius, where the Captain wanted her to guide the negotiations, not just translate. It was an honor, and a sign of how far their relationship has come since the destruction of Vulcan. 

Nyota wonders who took her place. 

“Commander?” 

Nyota opens her eyes, slowly. She does everything slowly now, after the replicator died. When her vision settles, it does so on the sight of Nurse Flannigan running a tricorder over her. 

Flannigan checks the readings, as if they will be any different this time. “You need to eat, Commander,” he says.

It takes a long time for Nyota to string her thoughts together, loose and slippery as they seem to be these days. She shifts, pulling the thermal blanket tighter and curling closer to the bulkhead. All she wants to do is sleep, and her heavy limbs beckon her back to that dreamless paradise. But Nyota has a job to do, crew to care for, and so she sits up and licks her dry, cracked lips. 

She struggles to push her shoulders back and tilt her chin up, to assume the posture of command that has become second nature to her. “We all need to eat,” she says. “I’ll be fine, Nurse.”

Flannigan sighs and folds himself onto the floor in front of Nyota. He’s a mountain of a man, tall and broad, with cropped orange hair and hands the size of dinner plates. The first time Nyota met Flannigan, she mistook him for new security personnel. But there’s a gentleness in his big green eyes and calloused hands that marks Flannigan as a healer, and a good one at that. 

“No, sir. You won’t be fine, not for much longer.” He tugs on his hair, and looks at the floor. “Cixous only has hours left,” Flannigan whispers. “And Nev? I don’t know if xie will ever be able to come out of xier hibernation now.” 

Lieutenant Cixous had been injured when the ion current dragged them out of orbit. Half Rochii, her equivalent of a nervous system is highly sensitive to changes in the ion concentration in her surrounding area, and the extreme nature of the ion storm left her in a pain so severe that Flannigan has kept her under constant sedation. 

Ensign Nev, Starfleet’s first Ursinian recruit, was piloting the shuttle when the ion current hit. The navigational instruments reacted with the ion surge in a way that triggered xier hibernation, the Ursinian equivalent of a healing trance. But because the event was triggered unexpectedly, the chemical processes in xier brain couldn’t prepare xier body. And the Ursinian hibernation, if not entered into properly becomes a state of living death, with the consciousness alive and alert but unable to communicate with the body. 

Nyota knows now why the Captain jumped onto the drill rig at Vulcan, because this sticky, crawling inaction is nearly unbearable. But, if the medical instruments on the Volga are accurate, she won’t have to endure it much longer. 

God, she’s so hungry. But Nyota will not let herself eat before her crew. She is the commanding officer of this vessel, and she will do her duty to protect the wellbeing of those under her command.

Flannigan pulls his knees into his chest, and wraps his arms around them. The posture reminds Nyota of her little cousins, and tears spring to her eyes when she realizes that she will not get to tell them goodbye. She won’t get to laugh with her sisters again, or cook with her father, or sing with her mother. Nyota recorded a message for them, like all Starfleet officers must before they ship out, but it could never be enough. 

No. She can’t give in to this, she won’t. Nyota pulls herself to her feet, nearly toppling over when her vision goes dark and her legs threaten to collapse under her. Flannigan steadies her, until she pushes him away and staggers over to her fallen crew. 

Nyota lays a hand on Cixous’ translucent forehead, feeling the tiny twitches and spasms of a body under seige. “How are you supposed to take my job now?” Nyota says softly, wiping a hand across her eyes. 

Cixous, joined the Enterprise a year ago. On her first day in Comms, Nyota asked, as she does all new crew in her department, what they want out of their experience on the Enterprise. Cixous had saluted Nyota and said, in Old Low Talaxian, “Sir, I want to do what you do, only better.”

Nyota, reminded so much of her younger, more ruthlessly ambitious self, said, “You are certainly welcome to try.” She said it in Muqwer, a Klingon dialect only she and four other non-Klingons could speak. Cixous took that challenge seriously, and Nyota gained a protege and friend. 

When she stumbles across the shuttle to Nev, and sees the bear-like pilot so still and quiet, a different kind of grief falls over her. Nyota hadn’t known Nev before this mission, but she had heard bits and pieces of the cheerful pilot’s story over the past two years. Nev was the first Ursinian to ever leave xier home planet of Ursa, and the deeply familian clans of Ursa had exiled Nev for xier choice. But Nev had flourished at the Academy, and found a home on the Enterprise. 

“It’s not fair,” Nyota murmurs as she grasps Nev’s paw. “You’re so young, you should have had more adventures, more time, more life.”

She crumples on the carpet. “I’ve failed. I failed them all,” Nyota says into her hands. “I know how to say that in thirty five different languages, but I can’t do a damn thing about it!”

Nyota knows it’s illogical, and irrational, and only human, but for a moment she hates Jim, and Spock, and Scotty, and even Dr. McCoy. Because they have made doing the impossible so normal, so everyday, that it made her forget that not everyone can spin miracles out of disaster. 

How dare they, she thinks. How dare they, because Nyota cannot wring miracles out of herself and she hates herself for it.

Somewhere, Nyota feels herself being picked up, carried like a child. Once upon a time, she would have cared. But now, with the tether of her life reaching it’s last, fraying edges, Nyota couldn’t care less. 

A wrapper crinkles, and someone closes her fingers around a protein bar. Her starved senses hone in on the smell of food. But before she lifts the protein bar to her mouth, she croaks, “You first, Flannigan. You first.”

“Okay, Commander.” She doesn’t know where the voice comes from, but another protein bar unwraps and Nyota can’t bring herself to be ashamed of how much she wants to reach out and take it. She doesn’t though, and waits a torturous thirty seconds before eating her own protein bar in big, desperate bites. 

It helps, and Nyota feels more real than she has in a long time. It’s not a good thing, because now she knows, with the clarity of the recently awake, exactly how long she and her crew have to live. 

Two hours of oxygen left. Nyota drags herself over to the navigational array, and checks the instruments one more time. One last time, if she wants to be honest. And she does, but also doesn’t. And, just like every other time, the buttons and switches light up and blink at her, but do absolutely nothing.

“Come on,” she says under her breath, toggling the switchboard in the comm unit. When it once again fails to send or receive a signal, she cries out and slams a hand on it. “Why won’t you work, come on, please just work.”

They don’t respond, and Nyota leans her head down onto the console. She’s poured her life into those consoles, protected the Enterprise in her own way through them so many times, and this is how they repay her. With blinking, colorful silence. 

Flannigan slides, or falls, into the co-pilot seat. His cheeks are sunken and sallow, his Medical blues hanging off of him when two weeks earlier, they barely fit over his broad shoulders. 

Together, they stare at the black emptiness through the viewscreen. It’s one thing to live and work and fight inside a starship, and quite another to be so intimately aware of how fragile those big metal cocoons really are. 

“My great grand dad always said humans weren’t meant to understand how big it really is,” Flannigan says after a while, still looking into the deep. “I think he was right. We’re kidding ourselves, when we say we’ve charted the galaxy. We don’t even know how much we don’t know.”

“Chasing the impossible is what we do.” Nyota smiles faintly. She pulls her thermal blanket up around her shoulders, and turns to Flannigan. “Your great grandfather sounds like Dr. McCoy.”

“ Great grand dad makes Dr. McCoy look downright excited to be in space,” Flannigan laughs. “No, I think he took after our ancestors. The ocean was big enough for them, space was for the birds.”

Nyota chuckles, and asks, “Were your ancestors sailors?” Her own ancestors were scholars, mathematicians and artists, but not sailors. 

“In a way,” Flannigan says. He winks at her. “They were pirates, sailing the seas before the stars were an option.”

The life support monitor beeps. One hour of oxygen left. They should be conserving it, Nyota knows. But she also knows that preserving the oxygen will just prolong the inevitable another hour or two. And Nyota is so tired. 

Flannigan had pulled her aside yesterday, and showed a better way out in the form of four hyposprays. She told him only to use them if the other last resort became a reality. 

Nyota thinks of her mother again, of her cracked brown hands, and the way she made sure Nyota had a song for every moment in her life. She sang as she braided the hair of her children, as she put them to sleep, as they woke up in the morning, with a song that became a duet that went deep into Nyota’s bones. 

She told me I came into this world singing, thinks Nyota. I’ll be damned if I don’t go out that way too. 

Something stirs in her, tries to come alive, even as Nyota feels her body shutting down. She doesn’t remember most of the words, but Nyota will forget her own name before she forgets the lilting chorus of her childhood lullaby, forever combined with the scent of cocoa butter in her memory. 

But Nyota has never wanted to be a soloist, so she says, or at least she thinks she does, “Flannigan. Sing with me.”

And he does. Not Nyota’s song, but his own- An ancient, haunting shanty. They sing a strange duet in Swahili and Non-Standard English, and then a trio as the bell tones of Cixous’ Rochii join in. Nev sleeps on, so they sing for xier. 

They have twenty minutes of oxygen left, and the crew of the shuttlecraft Volga use them to sing their lives into the universe. 

We are here, they tell the endless black. We are alive, and you cannot take that yet. 

There are fifteen minutes of oxygen left when the comm console does the mechanical equivalent of a shimmy and a cough, and starts doing what a comm console should. 

Ten minutes of oxygen left, and the Enterprise gets a message. It’s garbled and faint and tuneless, but the funeral songs of the Volga reach their audience. 

One minute of oxygen left, and the Volga crew, their song long since confined only to their minds, finally come home.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own these characters, nor do I make any money off of this work. Also, I think music in space is now my brand, and I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
